Jon Huntsman Did Everything Humanly Possible

TICKET TO SLIDE /// Sources close to the campaign said Tuesday that the last glimmer, if any, remains in Florida.

Last March, when Jon Huntsman's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination began unofficially with a dinner in New Orleans — the former U.S. ambassador to China was still in Beijing — chief strategist John Weaver stood before potential staffers and mapped out several divergent paths to victory. But all of them began in New Hampshire, that moderate, independent, strangely influential pocket of America, and all of them began with a win there.

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New Hampshire was necessary for momentum. It was necessary for money. And it was necessary to show that Mitt Romney, the presumptive frontrunner even then — because Republicans love nothing more than the man who lost the last time around — could be beaten on what was essentially his home soil. For a relatively anonymous candidate like Jon Huntsman, New Hampshire would prove his launch pad.

It was a clear, logical strategy with modern precedent: John McCain's surprising 2000 campaign and successful 2008 Republican nomination were born in New Hampshire. They were born of a spectacular ground game, an almost relentless series of town halls and small gatherings in welcoming living rooms and diners. In the summer of 2007, when McCain's prospects looked their bleakest, he could drop into that safe little picturesque harbor and still feel like everything was possible.

And everything was still possible for John McCain. He won New Hampshire, and he went on to win the Republican nomination.

Many things are still possible for Jon Huntsman, too. After Tuesday night's third-place finish, however, the Republican nomination no longer appears to be one of them.

Huntsman, of course, tried to take an optimistic view of his hard landing behind Romney and Ron Paul. There were three tickets out of New Hampshire, he said. "I'd say third place is a ticket to ride, ladies and gentlemen," he told a small room of supporters. "Hello, South Carolina!"

If that didn't sound completely ridiculous, it was only because Huntsman's strategists had spent the intervening weeks and months "managing expectations," to use the language. They, and the other candidates and their teams, had been raising the bar for Romney — Newt Gingrich had suggested that anything less than fifty percent would be a demonstration of weakness for him — and lowering the bar for themselves. Now, it wasn't so critical that Huntsman win New Hampshire. Even second would show strength. Then when second seemed doubtful, it mattered only that he "did well."

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The convenience of "doing well" is that it's open to interpretation. "Well" is a relative measure. Huntsman's team talked about how, only days before the primary, he had been invisible in Iowa and polling in single digits in New Hampshire. They hoped to make any kind of double-digit result seem like a positive. They tried mightily to make third place seem like a victory.

But it was almost impossible to make Tuesday night seem like a victory for Jon Huntsman. The son of a billionaire, a two-time governor, a three-time ambassador, a smart, handsome, thoughtful candidate with excellent credentials and the man President Obama's own advisers feared the most finished with just 17 percent of the vote. He finished with just 17 percent in a state that was tailor-made for him, filled with independents and moderates and lovers of underdogs. He finished with just 17 percent in a state in which he had probably logged more miles than any other candidate in history, including John McCain. More than 170 times, Jon Huntsman had picked up a microphone and talked to a roomful of New Hampshire voters. "We've done everything humanly possible," he said. And yet not only did he finish behind Mitt Romney. He finished behind Ron Paul.

That's not to say Huntsman was lying when he said that he was headed south. He lies by far the least of all of these guys. He will go to South Carolina, where he doesn't stand a chance, and then he'll probably go on to Florida, because his wife, Mary Kaye, is from there and it will make for a gentle and graceful exit. If there's a glimmer of hope, sources close to his campaign said Tuesday night, it's that Romney now will be set upon by the remaining candidates and could stumble badly in South Carolina, turning Florida into a jump ball. But that's so much miracle dreaming. Florida will be the end of Jon Huntsman, or at least the end of Jon Huntsman, the Republican presidential nominee. Third-party candidate? Secretary of State? Professor of international relations? Who knows? But as far as this chapter of this story goes, it seems that all that remains is the dissection, the lessons for future political strategists about what went wrong.

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It's possible that in our divided time, Huntsman was never able to shake the crackpot's image that he was a Democrat in a Republican's clothing, because he had once accepted an appointment from the president he now pledged to unseat. (His late-game campaign slogan "Country First" might have done wonders had it come to him months ago.) It might have been his sometimes-awkward style in debates, his too-arch sense of humor, that did him in. It could have been his reticence to meet some of the more aggressive demands of his handlers, his totally insane belief that he could remain true to himself and still win something like a presidential nomination. It might have been that he was, in the end, too similar-seeming to his principal opposition, so much so that when the Republican electorate went through its endless "Anybody But Romney" cycles, it skipped over Huntsman and only him.

But the larger potential truth is also ultimately the hardest one. Maybe Jon Huntsman was doomed because John Weaver's clear, logical strategy, mapped out on that optimistic night in that restaurant in New Orleans, no longer applied to our age of politics without reason. This was a campaign built on sound, concrete things like math and history and physics. It was governed by rules, like gravity, and those rules no longer seem to apply.

Except for one: New Hampshire remains the underdog's only hope. Finish third in New Hampshire, behind the frontrunner and an insane old man, and you're not an underdog anymore. You're a man left looking for the one best path out.

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